Eddie Ray Jackson doesn't look like Muhammad Ali at first glance. What matters is that he inhabits the role so well that you'll follow him anywhere Will Power's "Fetch Clay, Make Man" wants to take you. And that's essential to the success of the West Coast premiere that opened Marin Theatre Company's season this week.

Call it effortless charisma. Call it grace. Jackson rhymes like Ali, shadow-boxes with the young champ's bewilderingly rapid footwork, and head bobs, sasses, boasts, plays around, turns serious and takes umbrage with the mercurial concentrated energy you expect in Ali at the time of his 1965 rematch with the forbidding former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. He floats. He knows he can sting. And, yes, he's pretty.

But "Fetch" isn't just or even principally about Ali. Roscoe Orman's seemingly laid-back, almost shiftless, but watchful and crafty Stepin Fetchit carries a great deal of the drama. Few of us have a mental image of Lincoln Perry - the actor behind the longtime film comic icon - by this point in his career's eclipse. But in a short time, Orman- "Sesame Street's" Gordon for four decades - makes us not only feel familiar with Fetchit but see him as an African American trailblazer.

Counterintuitive connection

That's a large part of Power's purpose. "Fetch" takes place at Ali's training camp in out-of-the-way Lewiston, Maine, at a time when Ali was a lightning rod of controversy - having won the title in a disputed match, then announced that he'd joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay. As if that weren't enough, the camp was under tight security, due to both Liston's reputed mob connections and the Nation of Islam's not-yet-proved part in the recent assassination of Malcolm X. Then Ali held a news conference and introduced Fetchit - widely considered an "Uncle Tom" and "traitor to his race" - as his new special adviser (yes, this really happened).

"Fetch" is Power's exploration of the counterintuitive connection between these potent symbols of black power (as Ali increasingly became, especially after he left the Nation of Islam to become a more mainstream Muslim) and black subservience (as the Fetchit character is still widely regarded). It's also in large part a reconsideration of Fetchit as a Hollywood pioneer, a master of subversive comedy and a savvy businessman (the first black actor to become a millionaire). It succeeds almost too well.

Power, a hip-hop theater powerhouse in the '90s, veers into the didactic at times in his first more-traditional drama. Director Derrick Sanders compounds that problem with a somewhat too naturalistic approach. But for the most part, he and the actors keep the action engrossing, mitigating the history lesson with smooth segues into Fetchit's Hollywood past and a smart, quick succession of projected historical images wrapping around Courtney O'Neill's compact locker-room box set.

A bracing, self-assured Katherine Renee Turner refreshingly cuts through the predominant testosterone as Sonji, Ali's first wife, bristling against the Black Muslims' restrictions on women. Jefferson A. Russell, a regular with Maryland's Round House Theatre (the play's co-producer), is a potent, seething presence as Ali's appointed bodyguard. Bay Area veteran Robert Sicular is commanding movie mogul William Fox, whose self-made-man pride serves as a foil for Fetchit's bargaining skills in entertaining but somewhat awkwardly inserted flashbacks.

Underlying tension

Russell's ominous presence amplifies an underlying tension as the Nation of Islam insistently seeks greater control over Ali's life and associations. If some of the plot developments and characters' changes of heart (and costume) are too abrupt for realistic drama, the actors for the most part make them work. Jackson is the anchor, as his irresistible Ali holds things together. Orman sweetly, almost offhandedly provides bright demonstrations of Fetchit's comic persona and a sly soft-shoe vaudeville routine.

Boxing aficionados may remember the second Ali-Liston match as the "phantom punch" fight, but we won't reveal how that figures into "Fetch." Let's just say that Jack Johnson is involved.